Re:Problem with Fiber (almost forgot this)
on
Wiring A New House?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
That kind of signal loss is going to be insignificant. The real problem with bending fiber around corners, is that the strands are somewhat fragile. I've seen runs of fiber that had to be doubled because some of fibers the first one had broken when the cable was bent too sharply. The best thing with fiber is conduit, because it gives smooth rounded corners.
Therefore, if the record companies hold on to their dying business models and do not adapt in light of newer, sustainable models (such as emusic) right in front of them, their boards of directors really do deserve what's coming to them.
Why don't we draft a nice friendly letter telling these boards of directors about such sustainable business models. It shouldn't be too hard to get ahold of the names of the people on these boards, should it?
Any business major types out there want to take a crack at it?
<rant>
Why do cell phones and these things have external antennas? It's not as if the case is metal. I'm sure they could find enough room inside the case to place that stubbly little wart of an antenna if they really wanted to. (Say along the edge of the flip up lid.)
</rant>
"Religeous": Oops! My Bad. Spell checker is in my mind, which rarely works at peak efficiency.
Well, How far and wide I (or rather, my religious organization) would want things to go is irrelevant. If I would want to allow people to copy the work, I would grant permission to copy. What I fail to understand is why my fictitious organization should not have the right to say who can and cannot copy the documents it produced, just because it is a religious one. (Fair use quotation notwithstanding).
(IMHO, if you claim you're a religion and are getting non-profit status, you should not be able to retain copyright.)
Perhaps it's a lack of caffeine, or that I was up waaay to late watching Star Trek, but I'm failing to see the logic of your opinion (It is an opinion. It says so. See! It says IMHO, right at the start.). Why should a religeous organization not be able to retain a copyright?
If I were a clergyman, and I wrote a bible study guide for my congregation, or a book on how to counsel someone in grief, or for that matter, how to keep your stained glass looking it's sparkliest, why should that not be copyrightable?
I've heard a lot about America'a war on terrorism. Who hasn't? However, I have only heard about attacks on Bin Laden's crew. What is the US coallition going to be doing about terrorism in Ireland, and in the Middle East? What about Rwanda?
Your Computer Science study is designed to produce sofware engineers. Most courses are. I was just trying to differentiate people like you from the "Teach yourself C++ in 20++ days", "Visual Basic for the Profoundly Dense", cut&paste script kiddie types who, when asked which is generally a better sort algorithm, bubble, or quick, would say "What? Sorting is sorting. It doesn't matter.", or "No, man. You either sort in ascending order, or descending order."
I once came across a date validation routine that did something like 31.14-18.82 as part of the calculation. I could not figure it out. (The code was not commented at all.) Eventually I went to the basic prompt and typed in "print 31.14-18.82". Instead of getting 12.32, I got 12.319999 and suddenly I realized what the code was doing. I felt like throttling someone.
I once heard "Computer science is an exact science. Computer science is an experimental science."
It is an exact science in that one can sit down and work out exactly what a computer is going to do. It is an experimental science in that most of the time it is easier to just run the program, see what comes out, and then figure out what happened.
A software engineer will differ from a programmer in her/his diligence with:
documentation: They will have specs and design documents in place before any coding is done.
testing: They will test every function. Testing will tend to be coordinated, disciplined rather than haphazard. They will test functions after they make any changes.
planning: A software engineer will map out data structures. They will work out a software design before they code anything.
resource use: A software engineer will be able to tell in advance what the resource requirements of the code will be. (IE, each record is going to take n bytes, the algorithm will run in n*log(n) time.
I agree with you. (Both about the artifact based definition, and the ICBM (although ICBMs don't land, they explode in the air to maximize damage))
The temperature at which water boils, or freezes is dependant on the pressure. As the pressure goes down, the boiling point goes down and the freezing point goes up. There is a certain pressure at which the boiling point and the freezing point are the same temperature. Under those conditions water can exist in any of the three states. This point is called the triple point. The make-up of the surrounding atmosphere is irrelevant.
So, take a fixed quantity of water (or maybe platinum, just to give that historical tie-in with the Official Kilogram) at its triple point, and there you have an artifactless kilogram.
Or maybe you could work something off of the force on parallel wires when a known current is flowing through them.
There's an episode where the Simpsons are watching TV, and an ad (for a monster truck rally if my memory serves) comes on blaring that tickets are the cure for a boring evening or whatever, and then it says "tickets are not to be taken internally" in the typical end of commercial disclaimer voice.
After this Homer says, "See! Because of me, they have a warning."
Michael J. Fox, Donald and Kiefer Sutherland, Jason Priestly, William Shatner, James Doohan, Rich Little, Keanu Reeves, Christopher Plumber, Martin Short, Dan Ackroyd, Mike Myers, Lorne Greene, Jim Carrey, Neve Campbell, Pamela Anderson Lee, Margot Kidder, Catherine O'Hara, Nelly Furtado, Celine Dion, Corey Hart, Bryan Adams, The Guess Who, The Tragically Hip, The BareNaked Ladies, BTO, Shania Twain, Paul Anka, Alanis Morissette, April Wine, Jacques Villeneuve, Bret and Owen Hart, Nancy Greene, Wayne Gretzky, Peter Jennings, Elizabeth Arden, Margaret Atwood, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Sam Goldwin, James Cameron, David Cronenberg
And then there's:
Acrylics, air-conditioned vehicles, dental mirrors, electric cooking range, electric wheelchair, foghorn, green plastic garbage bags, IMAX, insulin, machine gun tracer bullets, paint roller, pablum, Puzz-3d, Pictionary, Trivial Pursuit, the pacemaker, newsprint, STOL aircraft, Superman, Yachtzee, the zipper, basketball
... and, of course, ginger ale
Oh, just in case you're not aware of it, half of your exports head for the Great White North. So your economy is fairly dependant on ours.
OK, I've taken your advice and done a bit of reading:
"Evolution is a change in the gene pool of a population over time."
"The mechanisms of evolution are mutation, natural selection, genetic drift, recombination and gene flow."
Well, OK, selection is not the only factor in evolution. However, it is probably the most important, and it is definitely the most widely recognized.
Furthermore, nature doesn't determine fitness to survive because NATURE DOESN'T DETERMINE A GODDAMNED THING. Nature is not sentient - it's not even real, just a concept that human beings made up. You keep ascribing directed characteristics to something that doesn't exist and even in its least abstract form is unable to 'choose' anything at all since it lacks any form of consciousness or motivation
I did not in any way mean to imply that nature was sentient, what I meant was what is typically meant by natural selection:
"As each organism is tested by its environment, the number of its offspring depends on the fitness to survive conferred by those characteristics."
"In the long run, only those species that have qualities better adjusted to the natural environment can live longer. These organisms will usually have better ability to find or store food, or are more able to escape their predators. Thus, these organisms have more chance to mate and give birth to more and healthier off-spring."
Again, nothing out of the ordinary or contradictory here. Perhaps what is throwing you is the "reverse" logic I was using. If only the "fittest" survive, then the only organisms that an individual can breed with are "the fittest".
There's no 'selective' about it in evolution; everything that can breeds does, and the better-adapted offspring tend to win out over generations.
Finally, there is no 'fitness to survive' anywhere in the theory of evolution
I'm not sure I understand your point here. Even the most cursory reading on the subject of evolution is littered with references to selection and fitness. Even in your own words you use the terms "better-adapted", "win out", and "greater number of offspring". Well...
"Fitness. The probability that an organism with a particular set of traits will survive to reproduce more offspring than others that do not possess these traits."
"Fitness, in an evolutionary sense, is the average reproductive output of a class of genetic variants in a gene pool."
"Natural selection... is defined as differential reproductive success of pre- existing classes of genetic variants in the gene pool."
"Natural selection is not random: it is the determinate result of sorting processes according to relative fitness"
I'm going to leave all that aside. Your original assertion was that "evolutionary biology has no purpose at all. It simply happens; there is no guiding hand or principle.". Well, for the most part I understand and agree with what you're saying. However...
"Strict natural selection is not the only type of selection that takes place in nature or that has an effect on evolution. Other types of selection, all corollaries or variations of natural selection, are also present in the rich tapestry of evolution. The major variant types of selection are artificial selection, sexual selection, and kin selection."
"Artificial selection is the process by which a non-natural selection pressure on a population of organisms is set up by human activities, especially domestication of animals and plants. Humans breed from domestic organisms possessing the most desirable qualities in a process known as selective breeding, which then sets up a survival and reproductive advantage for those organisms that possess the desirable qualities. The result is an increase in the number of organisms possessing such qualities until these alleles come to dominate the gene pool of the population."
"Artificial selection is the process of changing the characteristics of animals by artificial means. For example, animal breeders, are often able to change the characteristics of domestic animals by selecting for reproduction those individuals with the most desirable qualities such as speed in racehorses, milk production in cows, trail scenting in dogs."
So, the point of my previous posts, is this: Your original assertion that "evolutionary biology has no purpose at all. It simply happens; there is no guiding hand or principle." is not quite true. Some of it is directed by mankind.
breeding and evolution have nothing whatsoever to do with one another
POPPYCOCK
Evolution is the change in the genetic makeup of a species as a result of selective breeding. Whether that selection is natural, or artificial is irrelevant. The mechanism is the same. Individuals with adventageous genetic traits are available to breed, so those genetic traits are favoured. Individuals with unfavourable traits are unavailable, so those traits are not passed on.
The only difference is that man is determining the fitness to survive, rather than nature.
...whereas evolutionary biology has no purpose at all. It simply happens; there is no guiding hand or principle.
Not quite. Mankind has directed the evolution of many species for a long time: cross pollenating to produce hardier plants, selectively breeding animals for strength, speed, shape, etc. We have husbandry records dating back farther than most people can trace their own ancestry.
That would be about a T1200-0, as near as I can tell.
Why I used to post AC
on
Slashdot Updates
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I used to post AC because all of the nicknames I tried to come up with were already taken. I don't use foul language in my posts, nor do I fan any of the flame wars. I always try to be insightful, or humourous, or contributory in some way. I've had some of my AC posts get modded up to +3.
I think that it is a shame that many useful posts get missed just because someone was either too lazy to log in, had forgotten their password, was on another machine, or (like me) lacked enough imagination to come up with a cool nickname.
ACs should post at 0. If a comment gets modded up or down it should be because of it's content, not because someone is anonymous.
(Actually, Slashdot was anoying there for a while because the defaults were ACs post at -1 but read at 0... I couldn't read my own posts.)
When I first read this I was thinking "People are going to hack them and put them on their robots for vision." Also, if these cams are light enough, they can be mounted on all sorts of RC equipment.
That's right folks! Get a photo of the neighbour cringing in fright as you buzz his back yard bbq with your e-cam equipped radio controlled spy plane!
Not something you'd want to do with a "real" digital camera.
It wouldn't help much. Even if you cleared the debris, you still can't cross a bridge that isn't there.
The 401 Highway is the backbone of Ontario. The vast majority of commercial traffic runs on it. If the 401/Kingston Rd. bridges were taken out, sixteen lanes of traffic would have to detour for say 20-50 Km in order to cross a single lane bridge that probably couldn't take transport trucks anyway. The east end of Toronto would be fairly effectively shut down.
Detouring around this single point of damage would cause traffic jams that would take hours to get through.
"Otherwise is the robot with light -, contact and rotation sensors equipped it on its course to lead and steer are."
Sounds like something Yoda would say.
Slashdot Mirror
That kind of signal loss is going to be insignificant. The real problem with bending fiber around corners, is that the strands are somewhat fragile. I've seen runs of fiber that had to be doubled because some of fibers the first one had broken when the cable was bent too sharply. The best thing with fiber is conduit, because it gives smooth rounded corners.
"We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty"
Why don't we draft a nice friendly letter telling these boards of directors about such sustainable business models. It shouldn't be too hard to get ahold of the names of the people on these boards, should it?
Any business major types out there want to take a crack at it?
That "3D" feel is probably from the 3D animation software that they use to generate those scenes.
<rant>
Why do cell phones and these things have external antennas? It's not as if the case is metal. I'm sure they could find enough room inside the case to place that stubbly little wart of an antenna if they really wanted to. (Say along the edge of the flip up lid.)
</rant>
Well, How far and wide I (or rather, my religious organization) would want things to go is irrelevant. If I would want to allow people to copy the work, I would grant permission to copy. What I fail to understand is why my fictitious organization should not have the right to say who can and cannot copy the documents it produced, just because it is a religious one. (Fair use quotation notwithstanding).
Perhaps it's a lack of caffeine, or that I was up waaay to late watching Star Trek, but I'm failing to see the logic of your opinion (It is an opinion. It says so. See! It says IMHO, right at the start.). Why should a religeous organization not be able to retain a copyright?
If I were a clergyman, and I wrote a bible study guide for my congregation, or a book on how to counsel someone in grief, or for that matter, how to keep your stained glass looking it's sparkliest, why should that not be copyrightable?
I've heard a lot about America'a war on terrorism. Who hasn't? However, I have only heard about attacks on Bin Laden's crew. What is the US coallition going to be doing about terrorism in Ireland, and in the Middle East? What about Rwanda?
I once came across a date validation routine that did something like 31.14-18.82 as part of the calculation. I could not figure it out. (The code was not commented at all.) Eventually I went to the basic prompt and typed in "print 31.14-18.82". Instead of getting 12.32, I got 12.319999 and suddenly I realized what the code was doing. I felt like throttling someone.
It is an exact science in that one can sit down and work out exactly what a computer is going to do. It is an experimental science in that most of the time it is easier to just run the program, see what comes out, and then figure out what happened.
A software engineer will differ from a programmer in her/his diligence with:
documentation: They will have specs and design documents in place before any coding is done.
testing: They will test every function. Testing will tend to be coordinated, disciplined rather than haphazard. They will test functions after they make any changes.
planning: A software engineer will map out data structures. They will work out a software design before they code anything.
resource use: A software engineer will be able to tell in advance what the resource requirements of the code will be. (IE, each record is going to take n bytes, the algorithm will run in n*log(n) time.
The temperature at which water boils, or freezes is dependant on the pressure. As the pressure goes down, the boiling point goes down and the freezing point goes up. There is a certain pressure at which the boiling point and the freezing point are the same temperature. Under those conditions water can exist in any of the three states. This point is called the triple point. The make-up of the surrounding atmosphere is irrelevant.
So, take a fixed quantity of water (or maybe platinum, just to give that historical tie-in with the Official Kilogram) at its triple point, and there you have an artifactless kilogram.
Or maybe you could work something off of the force on parallel wires when a known current is flowing through them.
After this Homer says, "See! Because of me, they have a warning."
Will they be running OS2 Warp, or OS2 Weft?
Perl, Assembler, Sanity - Choose any two?
Yeah, I really hesitated about listing that one. But it was probably one of those "flamed if you do, flamed if you don't" kind of things.
Michael J. Fox, Donald and Kiefer Sutherland, Jason Priestly, William Shatner, James Doohan, Rich Little, Keanu Reeves, Christopher Plumber, Martin Short, Dan Ackroyd, Mike Myers, Lorne Greene, Jim Carrey, Neve Campbell, Pamela Anderson Lee, Margot Kidder, Catherine O'Hara, Nelly Furtado, Celine Dion, Corey Hart, Bryan Adams, The Guess Who, The Tragically Hip, The BareNaked Ladies, BTO, Shania Twain, Paul Anka, Alanis Morissette, April Wine, Jacques Villeneuve, Bret and Owen Hart, Nancy Greene, Wayne Gretzky, Peter Jennings, Elizabeth Arden, Margaret Atwood, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Sam Goldwin, James Cameron, David Cronenberg
And then there's:
Acrylics, air-conditioned vehicles, dental mirrors, electric cooking range, electric wheelchair, foghorn, green plastic garbage bags, IMAX, insulin, machine gun tracer bullets, paint roller, pablum, Puzz-3d, Pictionary, Trivial Pursuit, the pacemaker, newsprint, STOL aircraft, Superman, Yachtzee, the zipper, basketball... and, of course, ginger ale
Oh, just in case you're not aware of it, half of your exports head for the Great White North. So your economy is fairly dependant on ours."Evolution is a change in the gene pool of a population over time."
"The mechanisms of evolution are mutation, natural selection, genetic drift, recombination and gene flow."
Well, OK, selection is not the only factor in evolution. However, it is probably the most important, and it is definitely the most widely recognized.
Furthermore, nature doesn't determine fitness to survive because NATURE DOESN'T DETERMINE A GODDAMNED THING. Nature is not sentient - it's not even real, just a concept that human beings made up. You keep ascribing directed characteristics to something that doesn't exist and even in its least abstract form is unable to 'choose' anything at all since it lacks any form of consciousness or motivation
I did not in any way mean to imply that nature was sentient, what I meant was what is typically meant by natural selection:
"In the long run, only those species that have qualities better adjusted to the natural environment can live longer. These organisms will usually have better ability to find or store food, or are more able to escape their predators. Thus, these organisms have more chance to mate and give birth to more and healthier off-spring."
Again, nothing out of the ordinary or contradictory here. Perhaps what is throwing you is the "reverse" logic I was using. If only the "fittest" survive, then the only organisms that an individual can breed with are "the fittest".
There's no 'selective' about it in evolution; everything that can breeds does, and the better-adapted offspring tend to win out over generations.
Finally, there is no 'fitness to survive' anywhere in the theory of evolution
I'm not sure I understand your point here. Even the most cursory reading on the subject of evolution is littered with references to selection and fitness. Even in your own words you use the terms "better-adapted", "win out", and "greater number of offspring". Well...
"Fitness. The probability that an organism with a particular set of traits will survive to reproduce more offspring than others that do not possess these traits." ... is defined as differential reproductive success of pre- existing classes of genetic variants in the gene pool."
"Fitness, in an evolutionary sense, is the average reproductive output of a class of genetic variants in a gene pool."
"Natural selection
"Natural selection is not random: it is the determinate result of sorting processes according to relative fitness"
I'm going to leave all that aside. Your original assertion was that "evolutionary biology has no purpose at all. It simply happens; there is no guiding hand or principle.". Well, for the most part I understand and agree with what you're saying. However...
"Strict natural selection is not the only type of selection that takes place in nature or that has an effect on evolution. Other types of selection, all corollaries or variations of natural selection, are also present in the rich tapestry of evolution. The major variant types of selection are artificial selection, sexual selection, and kin selection."
"Artificial selection is the process by which a non-natural selection pressure on a population of organisms is set up by human activities, especially domestication of animals and plants. Humans breed from domestic organisms possessing the most desirable qualities in a process known as selective breeding, which then sets up a survival and reproductive advantage for those organisms that possess the desirable qualities. The result is an increase in the number of organisms possessing such qualities until these alleles come to dominate the gene pool of the population."
"Artificial selection is the process of changing the characteristics of animals by artificial means. For example, animal breeders, are often able to change the characteristics of domestic animals by selecting for reproduction those individuals with the most desirable qualities such as speed in racehorses, milk production in cows, trail scenting in dogs."
So, the point of my previous posts, is this: Your original assertion that "evolutionary biology has no purpose at all. It simply happens; there is no guiding hand or principle." is not quite true. Some of it is directed by mankind.
POPPYCOCK
Evolution is the change in the genetic makeup of a species as a result of selective breeding. Whether that selection is natural, or artificial is irrelevant. The mechanism is the same. Individuals with adventageous genetic traits are available to breed, so those genetic traits are favoured. Individuals with unfavourable traits are unavailable, so those traits are not passed on.
The only difference is that man is determining the fitness to survive, rather than nature.
Maybe they're burning all of the floppies they made in the 0.x and 1.x kernel days. <grin>
Not quite. Mankind has directed the evolution of many species for a long time: cross pollenating to produce hardier plants, selectively breeding animals for strength, speed, shape, etc. We have husbandry records dating back farther than most people can trace their own ancestry.
That would be about a T1200-0, as near as I can tell.
I think that it is a shame that many useful posts get missed just because someone was either too lazy to log in, had forgotten their password, was on another machine, or (like me) lacked enough imagination to come up with a cool nickname.
ACs should post at 0. If a comment gets modded up or down it should be because of it's content, not because someone is anonymous.
(Actually, Slashdot was anoying there for a while because the defaults were ACs post at -1 but read at 0... I couldn't read my own posts.)
That's right folks! Get a photo of the neighbour cringing in fright as you buzz his back yard bbq with your e-cam equipped radio controlled spy plane!
Not something you'd want to do with a "real" digital camera.
The 401 Highway is the backbone of Ontario. The vast majority of commercial traffic runs on it. If the 401/Kingston Rd. bridges were taken out, sixteen lanes of traffic would have to detour for say 20-50 Km in order to cross a single lane bridge that probably couldn't take transport trucks anyway. The east end of Toronto would be fairly effectively shut down.
Detouring around this single point of damage would cause traffic jams that would take hours to get through.
"Otherwise is the robot with light -, contact and rotation sensors equipped it on its course to lead and steer are." Sounds like something Yoda would say.